Mauvais Sang (1986) Review
Julie Delpy in Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986)
Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) is not conventional cinema. It is enigmatic, dazzling, and disturbingly lyrical. And yet successful. It’s a film about shots and scenes, moods and ineffable sentiments; about youth and its simmering intensities, its suicidal impulses.
Alex, the main character played by Denis Levant, is weird, thin, and sickly. Everything seems wrong with this guy. He has the defiant face and the idiosyncratic spirit of an enfant terrible, but seems dumb. Michel Piccoli plays a type: the old, world-weary crook.
But the perfectly cast women steal the show. Juliette Binoche as Anna (an homage to Anna Karina: Binoche even does her hair the way Karina did in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie) is gloomy and melancholically beautiful – a true dark lady who’s just a girl. Julie Delpy is Lise, Alex’s young, abandoned lover. The director has an easy job with this one: she merely looks at the camera and the frame overflows with lovesickness. Sometimes great cinema is all about faces. And Delpy’s face is of rare delicacy, a resistent innocence pervades her traces even as she gets a condom from the drawer, which is quite an accomplishment.
There are many highlights to this great film: the sublimity of the parachuting scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA-AR2tN-Is); the heart-rending ‘Limelight’ scene with a toddler going to his mother as the Chaplin tune plays; the ludicrous and strange wee hour moments; and, of course, the “Modern Love” scene, with Alex running desperately, anguished, suddenly unrepressed and loose, through a dark street in Paris, an embodied scream. Everything is, indeed, wrong with this guy. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE_hYojg90o)
The film is like reading a strange poem you do not understand, but glows with images and glimpses of sublime metaphors. Subtle and nocturne at times, clear and romantic at others. Existential apprehension in looks and bodies: Denis Levant’s physicality explains more of his character than any regular script might. Adjectives flow in the mind to describe this film. Young, sensual, tender, poignant. But also dark, woeful, and sexual. They all capture something of it and yet miss a lot, for it’s all about images. It’s cinema. But it is one more thing also: another great link in a long tradition of poésie maudite. An accursed masterpiece.
